Genestack offers ‘missing link’ for genomics drug discovery

“Genestack is providing an essential missing link between data and its analysis,” says Imad I. Yassin, recently appointed Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Genestack, the Cambridge-based biodata management company.

Yassin says: “Research and Development directors say that one of the major bottlenecks for drug discovery is the effort required to prepare diverse public and propriety data for analysis, and they are investing significant resources into trying to solve this problem.

“Genestack’s platform does the painful part. It can provide access ‘off-the-shelf’ to all the public/proprietary data that a bioinformatician would need, loaded, indexed, searchable and ready for analysis.”

Yassin brings experience of fast-tracking early stage companies in the genomics space. The most recent, Integromics, was acquired by PerkinElmer to become part of its global informatics solution.

Genestack CEO Dr Misha Kapushesky says: “Genestack is preparing for growth and we are delighted to have Imad Yassin on board. He brings global sales experience and an impressive track record in business development.”

Genestack has developed a set of easy-to-use tools that allow scientists involved in drug discovery to gain insights from the data without the need for sophisticated programming knowledge. The platform enables the collection, federation, and tracking of data and its provenance across different sources – public and internal – for analysis and visualisation.

Yassin continues: “What really attracted me to Genestack is that it has a solution that does the job. It is not a start-up; its data management and analysis platform is based on a decade of experience gained at the European Bioinformatics Institute and has been developed further in partnership with large pharma.”

It is not just access to public data. Most pharmas have generated their own data over the years and this is locked in silos, held in different formats and created for different uses. Genestack can be used alongside existing legacy systems to help biologists gain access to all of this data. It has a powerful metadata system that describes the data and makes it indexed and searchable. This is critical, e.g., for rapid, interactive cohort selection and population level genotype association analysis.

“Genestack is solving some of the biggest pain points experienced by large pharma,” Yassin concludes.

Outside of Genestack, Yassin sits on the Advisory Board of the World Leaders Forum and of the Singularity University, which has evolved from a Silicon Valley think tank. He is also the chair of the Idris Foundation, which aims to improve the lives of refugees through technology.